October is National Anti-Bullying Awareness Month, and I’ve found a fun media literacy resource (provided by the Cartoon Network of all places!) to use with my students.  Their campaign is called Stop Bullying Speak Up, and it uses videos and games to raise awareness of the issue of bullying.

My 5th Grade classes will be taking the Stop Bullying Speak Up Comic Challenge this month by creating their own comic strips using BitStrips for Schools.

I introduced the topic to the students last week and we had a class discussion about bullying.  It turns out that some of our kids have already started their own anti-bullying after-school club, so this project was an instant hit with them.

At the end of class, I gave them a homework assignment for this week:  brainstorm some ideas for an anti-bullying message that you could use in a comic strip; figure out what characters you’ll need, what the characters will say, and what the setting will be; and put all of this information on paper to bring to your next Library class.  This week they’ll create an avatar to use, and by next week I hope they will complete their comics.

I’ll continue to share the ups and downs of the project here.  Anyone else using this resource with your students, or doing some other anti-bullying activity?

Update 10/20:  The kids have been having a blast with the Bitstrips tools this week, especially creating the characters for their comics.  Maybe I should start using my Comic avatar here!